You Give Love a Bad Name, Part 2

The reason given in 1 Timothy 2:14 for why a woman is not to teach or have authority over a man is because she is weaker, and not just physically. Women are easier to deceive, just as Eve, not Adam, was beguiled by the serpent. Eve was targeted specifically because she was easier prey.

John Gill writes in his commentary on 1 Timothy 2:14:

Adam never was deceived at all; neither by the serpent, with whom he never conversed; nor by his wife; he knew what he did, when he took the fruit of her, and ate; he ate it not under any deception, or vain imagination, that they should not die, but should be as gods, knowing good and evil. He took and ate out of love to his wife, from a fond affection to her, to bear her company, and that she might not die alone; he knew what he did, and he knew what would be the consequence of it, the death of them both; and inasmuch as he sinned willfully, and against light and knowledge, without any deception, his sin was the greater: and hereby death came in, and passed on all men, who sinned in him: but the woman being deceived was in the transgression: and the serpent really beguiled her; she owned it herself, Genesis 3:13. And this is elsewhere said of her, 2 Corinthians 11:3, which never is of Adam.

Patriarchy is how men have controlled women’s instinctive hypergamy. It alleviates the need for conflict and violence to fence women from other men, as the Bushmen of the Kalahari do. In Zimbabwe, false paternity is as high as 70 percent. F. Roger Devlin calls this more of a primate than human mating ritual. A staggering 92 percent of biracial children with black fathers are born out of wedlock, and 82 percent of these end up on the welfare dole. In China, women’s feet were bound so they couldn’t run away and cheat on their husbands. Muslims conceal their women in bags, because low trust is inherent to their idolatry. Africans mutilate female genitalia to prevent women from enjoying sex, and thus from cheating. In the Christian West, civilization developed because men did not allow women to usurp their authority or to pursue careers over motherhood, and women submitted to the authority of their husbands because they submitted first to the will of God as communicated through the prophets and apostles. Trust flourished, making cooperation and family formation possible, creating stronger social bonds. Patriarchy minimizes cuckoldry and maximizes fertility. As men have grown weak and ignorant, feminism has flourished. Now fertility is far below replacement level, while cuckoldry is on parade.

At the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, when feminists were just beginning to spread their labia and fly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. The name was carefully chosen to couch subversion in principles well understood by the founders and early republicans. Stanton even rewrote the Declaration of Independence to remove it from its context and pave the road to equality with what were understood by many to be the best of intentions.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal…

Sir William Blackstone, in “Of the Nature of Laws in General,” from the introduction of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1758), writes, “[T]he foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law” is “that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness.” This made its way into our Declaration as the “unalienable right” of “the pursuit of happiness.” Blackstone meant that all law must protect what is good for man’s happiness and forbid what is bad for man’s happiness, and that reason would allow us to understand this except that it has been clouded by sin, such that God must reveal his divine law to us “in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason”; and these divine laws “are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures.”

Stanton twisted this principle to argue that any laws which benefit men but make women unhappy are contrary to nature, since women are equal to men, as “was intended to be so by the Creator.” Having declared men and women to be equal, not only at the bar of justice but even in the roles they occupy, there ought to be no “monopoly of the pulpit” for ministers of the gospel.

Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak, and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies…

By this point, men had for centuries been absorbing the suggestion, contrary to Scripture, that women were not the weaker sex, except in the physical sense, and were less easily deceived than men, so that even these first-wave feminists could claim for themselves a moral superiority.

Revolutionaries had long since begun to purge from the law the old Christian framework of marriage, expressed so well by Blackstone:

The husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing.

Having assumed moral superiority, feminists took aim at the source of much of their unhappiness: divorce law. Men have “so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women…”

Men approached the law as Blackstone himself approached the law, which is that our fallen faculties of reason must always be subordinate to God’s Word. Rights do not exist otherwise. Feminists made subjective “happiness” their god and were ultimately successful in remaking the law in their new god’s image. They called for a practically unattainable equality while presuming inherent moral superiority.

“If the Jacobin theory be true,” said R.L. Dabney in 1888,1 “then woman must be allowed access to every male avocation, including government, and war if she wishes it, to suffrage, to every political office, to as absolute freedom from her husband in the marriage relation as she enjoyed before her union to him, and to as absolute control of her own property and earnings as that claimed by the single gentleman, as against her own husband. . . . My wish is to make all Christians face this plain question: Will you surrender the inspiration of the Scriptures to these assaults of a social science so-called?”

Today, we read these words from the vantage point of marriage, sex, race, and nation having been legally blended and erased. We now know the answer to Dabney’s question. Christians traded their inheritance for respect, their countries for globalism, and the faith of their fathers for Gnosticism. A Christian woman recently had the audacity to point out that men in search of wives prefer debt-free virgins without tattoos. A shocking number of evangelimps berated her for it, arguing that if God redeems us, regardless of our past, men should do the same and treat all women, regardless of their baggage, as equal when choosing wives for themselves. To our postmodern Gnostics, natural affections are evil, which is why they love open borders and mass immigration. They believe that eliminating national borders and racial and sexual boundaries will hasten the globohomo Utopia which they mistake for Christ’s Kingdom.

In our time, few remember (and it’s certainly not taught in schools) that the Declaration of Independence is not an instruction manual for tearing down natural, God-ordained inequalities. It was meant to assert the rights of free men to determine their own collective future, under the law, and cast off the burden of a monarch who believed that he was, by virtue of his birth, superior to the law.

But how did we arrive at the popular lie that everyone with a pulse is born equal in every respect, their minds blank slates upon which only the forces of nurture may write? Stay tuned for the next article in the series.

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Faith & Heritage is a consortium of Christian writers from a traditionalist perspective. F&H features a diverse range of opinions among its writers, and any particular opinion expressed is not necessarily indicative of universal agreement among F&H admins or writers.

The superhero genre was one of the last quasi-traditional genres of American pop culture. Batman, Superman, and the other assorted heroes and villains literally came out of the early twentieth-century[…]

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Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. - Deuteronomy 32:7-8